Sorry for the Group Email

We arrived from Halung Bay refreshed. For the paltry sum of $55 each we had spent a night on a boat and another in a nice hotel, eaten well and seen wild monkeys, all against a backdrop of blue skies and emerald-green water. We were ready for Hanoi, unlike our first arrival there; cold, wet and miserable after a 27-hour journey from Laos. We arrived with a full wallet and a recommendation for the Hotel Rose in the old town. Things, surprisingly, went smoothly.

Things had not been going smoothly. Our first time in Hanoi we had looked at four hotels before we found one with an available room and a reasonable price. In Phonsavan we had settled for the first one we stumbled across and had needed to spend our entire time trying to convince the owner that we didn’t want to take his overpriced tour to the Plain of Jars.

But the Hotel Rose had a room immediately available, which we bagged for $15 a night.

That evening we ventured out of the old quarter. The Old Quarter in Hanoi occupies a few square miles, and is a mess of densely-packed streets and crammed buildings. It houses souvenir shops, motorcycle repair shops, tailors, and a thousand places to buy noodles. It’s where you’ll find the cheapest rooms in town, but for a glimpse of Hanoi’s French-era splendour, you need to branch out a little.

We branched out to the Sofitel Metropole, a splendid turn-of-the-century building that, when we arrived, had a handful of turn-of-the-century cars parked outside. The kind of cars that are kin to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. I’m not sure if they were there all the time, but they certainly lent the hotel something of a gracefulness that we’d all but forgotten about.

When our hotels got us down, you see (such as our mattress on a floor in Chiang Kong, or our hotel in Pak Beng, Laos, in which the power went off at 10:30pm every night), I would drift back to work.

At work, you see, I spent a reasonable amount of time abroad. As I lay on our floor mattress in Chiang Mai, I found myself back in the Shanghai Grand Hyatt, where I spent a few days last year. My room was on the 60th floor. There was a 42in LCD TV on the wall, a writing desk, two armchairs and a bed which, if I laid in the middle, I couldn’t touch the sides of. The writing desk looked out over Shanghai and I spent a happy few days writing news stories from the 60th floor.

I mention this not to boast (although at the time I think I was quite tedious about it), but merely to demonstrate the kind of despair and fatigue that sets in when you find yourself in a hotel or hostel that’s completely devoid of comforts. Not just top-end comforts like flat-screen TVs and room service, but without comfortable beds, adequate lighting, or mosquito nets.

The Sofitel Metropole is a place on a par with the Shanghai Grand Hyatt, but with added old-world charm. Besides being a five-star hotel, it’s a beautiful piece of architecture, and we’d heard that it had a collection of historical Hanoian postcards from before the Communist revolution.

I didn’t think this was a good idea. We were going to roll up to a five-star hotel, unwashed, unkempt and unshaven, dressed in clothes that had already seen half a dozen countries in under two months, and that were badly in need of a wash.

But instead of kicking us into the gutter (where we belonged, to be fair), the staff at the Metropole were fabulously obliging. They guided us to the exhibition, all the time answering our wide-eyed questions: we had virtually forgotten what a nice hotel looked like. The Metropole has more than 300 rooms and two restaurants, one French and one Vietnamese. We gazed around us at the well-dressed guests and diners in wonder. The walls were clean, we noted. No-one looked like a lost extra from The Beach. The Metropole certainly didn’t seem like the place that would have an inexplicable brothel on the second floor, like our hotels in Ulan Batar and Beijing.

The collection of postcards was as interesting as the hotel. The postcards showed a Hanoi almost totally devoid of traffic and noise, the occasional cyclo (rickshaw) making its way quietly down a wide, empty street. Pedestrians were scarce, and it was hard to reconcile the images with the city as it is now.

Hanoi today is a loud, piercing place, where scooter horns sound 24 hours a day and the streets are not as much bustling as they are awash with everything from stray dogs to men selling fake Rolexes and RayBans from portable shops hung from their necks. It was not unusual, in our time there, to look up the road and find a veritable wall of scooters bearing down on us. It was not unheard of, in fact, to look up the pavement and find the same. The postcards we saw suggested that the only way to be killed by the traffic in pre-revolutionary Hanoi would be to make a very concerted effort.

The Sofitel Metropole is near the Hanoi Hilton. Not the Hanoi Hilton, but the hotel, another top-dollar inhabitant of that part of town. The next day, though, we headed to Hoa Lo prison, which, during the Vietnam war, was dubbed the Hilton by sarcastic US airmen.

Much of the prison today is devoted to exhibitions detailing the miserable lives of Vietnamese political prisoners during the time of the French and their puppet government. However, the final few rooms are devoted to Hao Lo’s use as a small POW camp.

This kind of thing is nearly endlessly fascinating to me, and it’s often much to Mendy’s quiet but uncomplaining dismay that I enthuse, “gosh, really?” as we stand in front of one exhibit after another. It’s like crack to me. Hoa Lo’s moment came when I realised John McCain was imprisoned there after he was shot down over Hanoi.

The museum has, of course, the famous picture of McCain being dragged from Truc Bac Lake in Hanoi, after surviving his crash landing, but it also has, in a glass case, his entire flight suit, including his helmet and parachute. Quite what the American government makes of this (I assume it still legally owns the whole set), I’m not sure.

Unfortuantely, Hoa Lo is a dismal failure as a museum. Just to be clear, I wouldn’t expect a Vietnamese prison, in Vietnam, to be particularly glowing about America or its pilots, or the war, but it was a decidedly lop-sided experience nonetheless.

For instance, there’s plenty of space given to the fact that McCain was treated for his injuries after he arrived at Hao Lo. There’s no mention, though, that many of his injuries were inflicted post-crash by furious passers-by. There’s also no mention of the fact that McCain’s treatment was withheld until his captors realised his father was an Admiral and as such a spectacular bargaining chip.

When we were there we heard a guide say, “it wasn’t really a prison at all.” Most of the pictures are of Americans playing basketball or volleyball, or making their own Christmas decorations, as if Hoa Lo was some kind of peculiar, Asian version of Happy Days. There’s no mention of the torture endured by McCain and others, and perhaps it’s unfair to expect it. The Vietnam war is in the country’s immediate past, after all.

But I like to think that America is fairly candid about the Vietnam war; not least because it’s desperate to avoid a repeat. The insistence that everything was sunflowers and daisies at Hoa Lo is silly, and left me wondering what Americans make of it all when they visit - not just McCain himself, who’s visited before. I almost wish they’d kept the flight suit and pictures in the basement.

Dave recommends that once you’ve finished here, you visit my sister’s blog as she visits Brazil. She’s going to eat the face off a piranha, apparently. When you’ve read that, try my Vietnam set on Flickr.

Links

1973 article about McCain’s treatment in Vietnam.
AZ Central article about the same.

Now you’ve read that, how about one of these posts?

Phonsavan, Laos. If you’re not depressed enough, click here to read our account of a visit to one of the most bombed corners of the planet in Laos. There are craters the size of buses.
The War Remnants Museum and Cu Chi Tunnels, Saigon, Vietnam. North Vietnam doesn’t hold the monopoly on south-east Asian destruction, you know. Click here to see the macabre remains of the Cu Chi Tunnels, used by the Viet Cong, in Saigon.
Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Just in case there was any doubt as to the grisly nature of much of the history of the region, click here to see the legacy left by Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia.